The Glitter Scene Read online

  And maybe when she gives the drawings to Rita she thinks for a moment about Doris Flinkenberg, at the cemetery, before she died, the folk song. Just a breeze, through her head.

  The Winter Garden. The idea for the Winter Garden was not born there, Rita Strange, those contexts. It has existed for a long time. Whole long lifetimes. A game on a hill, three siblings. The three cursed ones in the eyes of others, rumba tones. She knows that, and does not know.

  But she thinks about other things too, which she does not think about of course but which exist nonetheless. The Child. Solveig. The Child.

  Sometime later, in the middle of the 1990s, she quits her job at the law firm, leaves a brilliant career that has picked up pace on the private side and gets a position as chief legal assistant in a small city in the northern region of the country.

  THE FUNERAL

  MAJ-GUN IS REUNITED with her family at her aunt’s funeral in January 1990. Elizabeth “Liz” Maalamaa—she took back her maiden name when she became a widow—has passed away at a respectable age; after a brief illness, quietly “fallen asleep,” literally, died in her sleep. A peaceful passing, the best you can think of, in her Portuguese winter home. And avoided being alone at the end. Her nephew Tom Maalamaa and his fiancée happened to be visiting, and after her death they took care of all the practical details. All papers, documents and, naturally, the repatriation of her remains to the homeland and the funeral in the little city her husband was originally from and had, for some time now, been resting in a spacious family plot where, during his lifetime, a spot had been reserved for his wife.

  The whole family, in the church, and at the reception afterward. Relatives and a large circle of acquaintances and friends and surviving relatives of the many old and sick whom Elizabeth “Liz” Maalamaa, during her career within the deaconry, had cared for with a big heart and tireless effort.

  “She made the last days for our loved ones so bright.”

  Flowers, telegrams, and loads of addresses that later, during the memorial service in the nearby fellowship hall, were read aloud by Tom Maalamaa in a loud, steady voice.

  And before, in the church: Maj-Gun’s father the pastor emeritus ministers the ceremony, speaking devoutly about Elizabeth “Liz” Maalamaa’s exploits during her career. And, next to the coffin below the altar, he wants, before he takes a small shovel and pours sand over the white coffin, grains of sand on folded, white silk fabric with beautiful white- and lilac-colored flower arrangements, from the earth you came, to the earth you shall return, say something personal too.

  About his own sister, the dearly beloved. For example: there were once two siblings, Elizabeth and Hans (the Pastor himself, that is), who found God early on, on the farm, up north in the country where they had grown up. Both siblings, and God: wandered in the woods that were large, like China, the wonderful Middle Kingdom. They decided they were going to become missionaries when they grew up, picked pinecones off the ground and lined them up neatly in a row on a rock and the pinecones were the Chinese to whom they preached the joyful message of Christianity that had come to them, Elizabeth and Hans, already at an early age. Almost like a miracle, their own revelation, in an environment that otherwise was not more than normalpiously religious.

  And when Hans, who was two years younger than his extremely more patient sister, sometimes grew tired and allowed his eager playfulness and his own rascalness take the upper hand, and started throwing the pinecones around—his sister did not get angry at him, she never did, but led the small, high-spirited boy back to their serious business with a gentle hand.

  “But with an affectionate hand”: it became a lasting childhood memory. And a character trait that would stay with his sister throughout her life, the affection, how it would just grow inside her.

  “A large and hardworking heart that would find many outlets later in life.” And of course, as it is in life, endure many trials.

  But also had a wonderful sense of humor, and when she became older she was able to laugh heartily at the somewhat exaggerated melancholy of her childhood. Because a playful humor existed inside her, even though she did not always let it out. And here in the church papa Pastor urges forth the image of a girl with hair braided far too tightly who became a young woman and let her hair down; swooned over film stars from the movies, wrote letters to them in Hollywood and received autographed pictures in return, greetings from Ingrid Bergman, Ava Gardner.

  So the small “missionaries” in the woods, the wonderful Middle Kingdom, the pinecones grew pale with time. Plans for the future under that cloak, but not God—not for Liz Maalamaa, never God. Just life, which got in the way… “and young women have their own dreams as you well know.” Papa Pastor pauses here where one can, at least if you are his daughter Maj-Gun Maalamaa, hear the ellipses hanging in the air. And it is and remains there in the church, where even several members of the upper-middle-class family that the dead husband belonged to are present, the Pastor’s only reference to the childless and not particularly happy marriage that followed.

  “On the other hand,” papa Pastor reasons—and yes, maybe this speech becomes long and certainly personal, it is often the case when Father gets going, but the devoutness and his own evident emotion make it so that all thoughts one could possibly have about a tiresome choice of words fail to come. The wordiness that the Pastor could devote himself to during ordinary Sunday sermons too and for which he sometimes had to endure certain criticism for; mild criticism, in and of itself, because on the whole the Pastor was a respected vicar in all of the congregations where he has worked. But there had, in other words, been those who at some point in passing had said that when the Pastor was speaking in church it could, quite simply, sometimes become a bit too much of a good thing; maybe also a small reference to what was not said out loud, oh no, my goodness, but about the Pastor’s “country upbringing,” which perhaps made it so that he did not have the same well-developed mind for “the simplicity in the heaviness,” “the elegance of the unsaid,” and similar things that certain other people had gotten from their mother’s milk.

  “I just get carried away so easily,” papa Pastor used to say in front of the family at the Sunday dinner table, apologetically as it were but with a rascally glint in his eyes because in reality he did not care what people said about him when he was preaching in church and the following Sunday he would, if he was in that kind of a mood, carry on the same way as always.

  Rascallike. That was a reminiscence for Maj-Gun as well, here and now in the church, of something old, not forgotten, but something she had not thought about very much for a long time. Her beloved father, how he is, was, and could be.

  “On the other hand,” papa Pastor continues as it were, pulling himself together. “The foundation that exists in everything,” Elizabeth “Liz” Maalamaa never lost it.

  Faith like a mountain. A child’s belief in God, innocent and self-evident but as an unspoken demand. Belief as something to answer to.

  Belief places certain demands on us when we have left childhood, become older. These demands can be formulated into words but should not be answered with words, but with actions. Belief is activity.

  And many times, papa Pastor remembers again, and when he speaks, the tears glimmering in his eyes, and no, it does not need to be said, he is not embarrassed about them, not in the least. When he personally, the brother, failed in his belief. For example during the difficult years at the theology department when he was beset with heavy doubts, pondered and pondered, fallen and fallen. Of course some of this brooding was the normal brooding of youth of the kind brooded on during a certain period in life, a passing phase. You understand everything, understand nothing, know a lot, lack experience, the experience that comes from the heart, the blazing core of faith and life.

  But there had also been a great, alarming question which, since he had left his comfortable and cozy childhood home, had been assaulting him: in the form of images, scenes of loneliness in a student room at a boarding
school for “country boys,” made him defenseless. So, suddenly, he felt as though he had lost all contact with the living, with mankind. And with God: that if God—that question, so simple, but struggling with it was like walking on hot embers, about God—where was he then in this world?

  I call to you from the abyss, Lord. But then, how his sister Elizabeth, “Liz,” student at the deaconess school, had come to see him at his student dormitory. Time after time, spoken to him, as in their childhood, in the woods—and gotten him to see. All the grace. The Light.

  “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”

  And finally, here in the church, now, papa Pastor says that the innocence of our childhood is the best thing we have.

  Maj-Gun, the warmth swells within her. And: how proud she is. Her father, there, in front of her, everyone. His words, his endless love.

  And how he personally, just in the moment when he has spoken about the grace the light, looks up, over all of the people in the church and at Maj-Gun, meets her gaze there where she is sitting in one of the back rows.

  The lost daughter who has returned. “On the other hand”: it was never like that. “On the other hand,” in some way, in that moment, as if father and daughter both, like in a mutual silent agreement, in some way want it to be like that. Inside both the father and the daughter there is a certain rather well-developed feeling for the dramatic, to take the opportunity and reinforce the drama, but not just because. But because of something obvious, and maybe that is the essence in the story about the lost child’s return. Something that has been murky and therefore impossible to say out loud.

  In the daylight. That it is over now, Maj-Gun. Beloved. Regardless of who you are, and that, whatever you have done, I love you and forever.

  The hymn in the church later. “Glorious here on earth.”

  Maj-Gun in the next-to-last row, the very end. She had to sneak in and take the first best possible seat because the memorial service had already started when she arrived and that is why she is not sitting at the front with the rest of the family. She was running late, nothing particularly special about it. Just taken the wrong bus, gone the wrong way.

  But then gotten on the right bus after all. “As it often is in life.” Maj-Gun smiles at the memory, in the middle of the memorial service.

  Something her father also said once, at that dinner table at the rectory, during her childhood. With a certain humorous emphasis too, but with the same good mood as always. Speaking of some of the new pastors who wanted to make use of modern analogies and the language of our time when they were preaching. Simple everyday similes and words besides, as easy to understand as possible. The way it is in life. Getting on the wrong bus, the right bus, remembering to stop at a red light, go when it is green, and brake for all of the pedestrians in the crosswalk. Sometimes you made a mistake, did something wrong, everyone does, but Jesus, who was forgiveness, forgave you.

  And the whole family had laughed at the dinner table, not harshly, because there, at the dinner table, there was no meanness. Just as the Manager once pointed out when Maj-Gun had let things get out of hand when she was talking about the future, “the pastor’s calling” that she still, just like her brother Tom, had never actually had, then her father papa Pastor that open-mindedness, he was not fundamentally minded, not the least bit. But just did not want to have “the language of our time,” everyone’s everyday in the church. Not because it was wrong but these trifling rules, concerns which were just concerns that had nothing to do with the great, life, death, both extremes. Which all of us in some way are affected by and which can be felt in church in particular.

  Everyone’s life that is, as it were, larger than that, and it needs to be taken seriously, not be diminished, just because it may not immediately be comprehensible.

  So not that, in the church. Wanted, in church, to have God’s holiness because it was what it was, almost in Esperanto. Have that space, that glory. And the words, the melodies, the words and the melodies that brushed against the unspeakable, the tremendous. We go to paradise with song.

  These words, not because they were supposed to be “solemn,” as it were, but because it was exactly these words which were felt in your body or which, in some way, already existed there. Set down inside you and when you heard them, came close to them here, how they were brought to life: something great, a glimpse of what is time but not directly history, rather time as an archaeology inside oneself, and inside other people, inside people in general. To feel that for a moment as well, such a participation. That all of us are also in some way the same: we carry ourselves in the same landscape—and time. That there was, is, another time, we carry ourselves in time that is not seconds minutes days years decades, my life, the story of my family… but time in the sense of “generations follow in the footsteps of generations.” A greater time, a landscape, everyone’s time.

  Wander inside God in time, in a landscape that we share, we have a share in each other, can see a glimpse of it sometimes. A woman who is cutting rug rags by a bucket, long strips, silk velvet rag scraps—

  There was room in that language. For everything. I am not without space.

  And there in that time then, a moment, a fragment of your own life. A fragment in a landscape with fragments of other landscapes inside it, the landscape of others. Across all borders, in time and space. Across narrow family borders too of course: mother father child inheritance beyond these inheritances but also these. And how obvious that the DAY OF DESIRE is housed in this landscape too. Something old that is not you but has come up inside you. The Happy Harlot, the Girl from Borneo, whatever; they are of course, were of course, just denotations. The Disgust as it were, as it was called for a time after childhood when there had been a built-in sense of that which was yourself but yet so much bigger than. But the Disgust then, devastating so to speak, so termed by Tom Maalamaa, in royal supremacy, Gustav Mahler behind his back. The Pastor’s Crown Princess who was the heiress to the words, and the words existed for him and became his and that pathetic girlfriend who quietly rolled her eyes next to him. Prompting, nodding in silent support, as if on order. Though, it was easier to agree of course, no resistance in it. Be in his landscape that was given limits the more he spoke, the limits of his words, became secured as the only landscape.

  So that you became, if you were his sister Maj-Gun, an extremity. Some sort of comment, the other. The Harlot, that is, with a capital letter suddenly hamba hamba, she came from Borneo—at least it was effective. Something in your eye then, if nothing else, because the brother who was standing at the window in his room in the rectory was suffering the view over the cemetery in a grand way. The Disgust still would have been a little tantalizing if not for the fact that this Happy Harlot was his own sister.

  But djeessuss, if you were the sister, you were supposed to be all of that to a T, you received. In order to prove a point. The Day of Desire. Don’t give way.

  But on the other hand, all that was just as true but that she, the sister, had not wanted to bear: first, the jealousy. The brother and the girlfriend behind the closed door in the brother’s room in the rectory and Maj-Gun on the other side, alone. Without her brother, rather much alone, regardless of how the siblings had been like cats and dogs with each other during childhood.

  “What do you see in her?” Maj-Gun could go into her brother’s room and ask when the girlfriend was not there. “I am fascinated by the Death in her,” he would have been able to say then, while he, as it were, was preoccupied with buttoning the cuff links on his starched shirt. But all of it was just silliness really, a slight becoming feeling of the “metaphysical” (he had loved that word for a while too) because later, when death showed itself for real, the girlfriend’s father who became ill and was suddenly dying, Tom Maalamaa had pulled away or maybe she was the one to retreat but one thing was certain: that when she left the rectory for the last time he had not exactly run after her. Let it be. Ordered Reader for the Preparatory Course for Future Lawyers
as COD “papa is paying,” and became engrossed in it.

  Second, We go to paradise singing. The Day of Desire. An experiment—or whatever it had been. It had drained off of her rather quickly—that is to say the Desire in all of it. Partly for the obvious: that it had not been much fun. Standing with your freezing bum among the headstones and that girlfriend who naturally happened to come running from the rectory just at the moment when she truly realized it was rather shitty, all of it, and out of resentment Maj-Gun had, in other words, cried. In other words cried NOT because she was ashamed or because it was a pity about her. In any case not in the way the girlfriend with the saucer eyes had seen it, poor poor thing what have they done to you? Which of course had made Maj-Gun even more frustrated and in combination with the jealousy that also always came to the fore during that time, in the girlfriend’s immediate presence, she had suddenly been standing there, howling about the WONDERFUL in all of this… about the Desire that was great and strong and et cetera. Djeessuss. The girlfriend, who had not understood a thing, had looked at Maj-Gun, frightened and suddenly so unhappy, confused, alone (her father was very ill then too), who Maj-Gun had, many times afterward with Susette, developed even more of a bad conscience from it.

  But as said, not amusing. Something violating about it too, there among the headstones, “receive.” That is to say, completely private. The innocence of one’s childhood. The boys who had come to the cemetery, the hayseeds often with some religious affiliation. Well, she had not really bothered about it actually, but afterward they had not looked at her and those years later, on the square, they seemed to have completely and totally forgotten that it was her, the Happy Harlot, the same person as the fatty in the newsstand, “today is the first day of the rest of your life.” The Happy Harlot had just been an idea to them. They drove cars around around the square, but around others “just think what Madonna has done for fashion,” girls like that, or that hollow-eyed one who had suddenly been there again—Susette Packlén, “I am fascinated by the Death in her,” silk velvet rag scraps rug rags. That one.